What is Business Intelligence?

If we talk about business, we are sure that everybody is not business minded and business minded people are the ones who should have knowledge about business intelligence. Then what is business intelligence? In fact, business intelligence (its abbreviated form is BI) is termed, according to wikipedia as "a set of techniques and tools for the acquisition and transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes". What is are the main functions of business? It greatly depends on the specific objectives of an organization for different reasons which further depend on their specific circumstances and industry.

i. They are used 

                a. in manufacturing for order shipment and customer support, 

                b. in retail for user targeting and profiling, 

                c. in financial and banking services for claims and risk analysis, 

             d. in transportation for fleet management, in telecommunications for 
                   understanding customer drop-off rates, 

                e. and in power and utilities for power usage analysis.  

What does Business Intelligence provide us? 
Business Intelligence technologies provide historical, current 
and predictive views of business operations. 

The man common functions of business intelligence technologies are:
a. reporting, 
b. online analytical processing, 
c. analytics, 
d. data mining, 
e. process mining, 
f. complex event 
g. processing, 
h. business performance management, 
i. bench-marking, 
j. text mining, 
k. predictive analytics and 
l. prescriptive analytics. 
m. business decisions ranging from operational to strategic
n. basic operating decisions include 
o. product positioning or pricing